Power Platform | Vlad Talks Tech

Is the AB-400 Harder Than the PL-400? A PL-400 Trainer Weighs In

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 14:31:36 GMT

2026 has been a big year for Power Platform certifications, and the latest exam to change is the PL-400. It has been replaced by the AB-400 exam, Extending Microsoft Power Platform Solutions with Code and AI. I’m not a developer, so this isn’t an exam I can advise you on myself, but at the Power Platform Community Conference I sat down with someone who just took it: Nathalie Leenders, a Microsoft MVP and Power Platform consultant and trainer at Wortell.

Key takeaways

The AB-400 replaces the PL-400 as the exam for the Power Platform Developer Associate certification, and it goes much deeper into code than the PL-400 did.
New topics include Power Apps code apps, AI-assisted app building, MCP servers and PCF components combined with AI, on top of the model-driven apps and Dataverse work you already know.
If you already hold the Power Platform Developer Associate certification, you don’t need to take the AB-400 to keep it.
Nathalie doesn’t recommend the AB-400 as a first exam, or to anyone who isn’t a developer: she suggests at least six months of hands-on experience first.
Her biggest tip is to go through every objective in the study guide and get hands-on with anything you haven’t used yet.

Why Nathalie took the AB-400 after the PL-400

What I found impressive is that Nathalie already had the PL-400 and took the AB-400 anyway, just to stay up to date. The PL-400 was actually the very first certification she ever did. She took it as a challenge, with a free voucher from a Microsoft Ignite Cloud Skills Challenge, and she’s honest that she doesn’t recommend that route to anyone.

The PL-400 was, and still is, the most technical Power Platform exam out there. As Nathalie put it, it’s about extending: “So it’s JavaScript, it’s plug-ins, it’s Dataverse. It’s way beyond the standard capabilities of model-driven apps.”

Microsoft was also very quiet about the switch. There was no blog post announcing the AB-400. I only found out because I have some automations that watch the Microsoft Learn pages, and they told me the PL-400 was retiring. Nathalie had been expecting an announcement too, and instead the exam was just there.

What changed in the AB-400 exam

Nathalie took the AB-400 to see what Microsoft now considers “extending” the Power Platform, because the technology has changed so much. She went in prepared for technical questions, but not as technical as they actually were, and it caught her by surprise. As she joked, they extended the scope of the extending exam.

It’s still model-driven apps and it’s still Dataverse, but the exam goes much deeper and adds Power Apps code apps and AI-assisted app building. The questions changed too. The PL-400 had a bit of JavaScript and TypeScript, while the AB-400 shows you a piece of code with a few options, and asks you to choose the right ones and put them in the correct order.

Microsoft’s study guide shows the same shift. The AB-400 is split into four skill areas:

Build Microsoft Power Platform solutions (15-20%)
Extend the user experience (25-30%)
Extend Microsoft Power Platform (35-40%)
Develop integrations (10-15%)

That’s why Nathalie’s advice is clear: if you’re not a developer, don’t take the developer exam this time. Even with her experience building plug-ins and JavaScript, and having taught the PL-400 course, she just about didn’t pass, and she’s going to take it again. She told me she was one checkbox on one question away. That has happened to me a couple of times as well, and I’ve also passed an exam by one checkbox, so it all balances out.

Do you need the AB-400 if you already have the PL-400?

No. The certification doesn’t change: it’s still the Power Platform Developer Associate. If you passed the PL-400, you don’t need the AB-400 to keep being a certified Power Platform developer.

Nathalie took it because she loves certifications, and because she wanted to see which direction Microsoft would take the exam. The catch is that the exam is so new that, when we recorded in late October 2026, there was no learning path and no practice exam yet, only the study guide listing the new topics.

That’s always a challenge with a brand-new exam. Early on, an exam can include content that eventually gets removed as it becomes more balanced, so taking it at the beginning is usually a tougher challenge.

What to get hands-on with before the AB-400 exam

I asked Nathalie what someone who passed the PL-400 a couple of months ago should open a lab and actually try. Her list:

Code apps and AI-assisted app building. You can create an app from a prompt, but she suggests going further into the code itself.
Visual Studio Code connected to the Power Platform. Connect to Power Apps and to an MCP server, and dive into code apps from there.
PCF components combined with AI. The PL-400 focused heavily on extending model-driven apps, Dataverse plug-ins and JavaScript, and the AB-400 goes much deeper into all of that.

There’s a lot of content in the AB-400 that wasn’t in the PL-400. That makes it more fun in a way, but it also goes very deep.

Does the AB-400 match what companies are building?

I asked Nathalie whether the exam lines up with what organizations are building today, or whether it’s more of a Microsoft wish list. Her answer was that it’s a little bit of both.

Microsoft is pushing toward this as the future, but the exam is still heavily model-driven apps, the experience we’re used to, enhanced much more with AI. And companies want to build apps very quickly. In her words: “We used to develop model-driven apps. It would take us weeks to do what we can now do in an hour with AI, and with the generative pages in model-driven apps.” Being able to enhance that with code is what the exam leans toward, and she thinks that’s both what Microsoft wants and what companies are looking for right now.

If you want to see where Microsoft is taking the platform next, my PPCC 2026 keynote highlights cover the biggest announcements from the same conference where Nathalie and I sat down.

Should the AB-400 be your first Power Platform exam?

It depends on how quickly you pick things up, because the AB-400 is a very broad exam. The PL-400 was already big, and this one covers a lot more. If you’re starting out in the Power Platform, Nathalie doesn’t recommend going for it first, the way she did years ago when the PL-400 had a smaller scope. She’d want at least a few months, ideally six months of experience with code apps, plug-ins, model-driven apps and extending.

For the path, she’d start with the fundamentals, then take the AB-410, which is the Intelligent Applications Builder certification, and maybe the AB-620 for Copilot Studio. That gives you more knowledge of AI and agents and how it all works, which helps because the AB-400 has an agent portion.

Nathalie also pointed out that the path used to be easy to follow: fundamentals, associate, expert. With the PL-600 going away, it’s no longer a linear route, and she’s hoping Microsoft makes it a bit more linear again. If you want to see where everything fits today, my Power Platform credentials overview lays it out, and the PL-900 study guide is a good place to start with the fundamentals.

Nathalie’s final tip: don’t underestimate it

Her one piece of advice for the AB-400 exam is not to underestimate it. Open the study guide and go through every objective. If there’s one where you think “I haven’t worked with that yet”, get some experience with it before the exam, because there might be one question on it, or there might be ten.

Nathalie shares a lot of what she figures out at work on her blog, and you’ll often find her on the monthly Microsoft Power Platform community call and the weekly calls. If you see her at a user group or an event, say hi.

What this means for you

If you already hold the Power Platform Developer Associate certification, nothing changes for you. You can take the AB-400 to learn what’s new, like Nathalie did, but you don’t have to.

If you’re planning to take the AB-400 exam, plan more hands-on time than you would have for the PL-400. Work through each objective in the study guide, build a code app, connect Visual Studio Code to the Power Platform and an MCP server, and try PCF components with AI. If you’re newer to the Power Platform, start with the fundamentals and the AB-410 before you come back to this one.

And if you’re not a developer, you’re in good company: I’m not going for this one either, especially after this conversation. They’re not Pokémon, and we can’t catch them all.

Ready to start studying for the AB-400? My AB-400 study guide brings together the skills measured and the resources to prepare for the Power Platform Developer Associate certification.

Power Platform Just Hit 80 Million Users: PPCC 2026 Keynote Highlights

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:37:28 GMT

Last year at the Power Platform Community Conference, Microsoft said that low code as we know it is dead. So before the PPCC 2026 keynote, a lot of people in Las Vegas were asking whether the Power Platform is dead as well. Well, I have good news for you, because Charles Lamanna said it pretty clearly: the Power Platform isn’t going anywhere, and it’s more important and healthier than ever.

Key takeaways

The Power Platform now has 80 million monthly active users, up from 25 million in 2022 and 56 million last year.
Microsoft announced an expanded and unified Microsoft Maker Community for everyone building across Power Platform, Copilot Studio and SharePoint.
You can now build Power Apps directly from the Microsoft Copilot app, and the result is a real app with real code behind it.
The new Copilot Managed Runtime gives vibe coded apps a Microsoft-hosted home that follows the policies your admins set.
Agents in Copilot Studio can now get their own identity, with a mailbox and OneDrive, and agent identities are rolling out to everyone right now.
The conference leaves Las Vegas and heads to Chicago on November 2 to 4, 2027.

Inside the Power Platform Community Conference 2026

I was at the Power Platform Community Conference 2026 in Las Vegas for the keynote, and the announcements matter whether you’re a maker, an IT pro, or the person who has to explain all of this to your team back at the office.

If you’ve never been to this conference, you’re really missing out. There were nearly 10,000 makers there this year, and between the sessions there were puppies. Yes, actual puppies in the expo hall. There was a makers market, an NFL experience where you could see how they use the Power Platform and tech to help their teams perform better, and even a human claw machine where you’re the one picking up the prizes.

The Power Platform now has 80 million monthly active users

Charles kicked things off by reminding us how much the world has changed since the first Power Platform conference in 2022. Back then, if you heard the word agent, you thought of Agent Smith in The Matrix. A prompt was a blinking cursor in a DOS terminal, a token was for playing Pac-Man at the arcade, and a vibe was just a feeling.

Since then, the Power Platform has grown massively, and I have the numbers to prove it. In 2022, the Power Platform had 25 million monthly active users, and today it’s at 80 million. That’s more than three times as many people in just four years. If you’ve been reading my recaps, it was 48 million in 2024 and 56 million last year, so this is the biggest year-over-year jump I’ve seen.

And it’s not just more people using the platform, it’s people doing more with it:

20% more people open a Power App every single day compared to last year.
There are 20% more flow runs, which shows that my favorite product, Power Automate, is doing better than ever.
AI usage in Power Apps has doubled.

So if you were worried the Power Platform was dying, the numbers tell you otherwise.

A new, unified Microsoft Maker Community

A big part of that growth is the community, and the Power Platform community is thriving, with members in more than 140 countries and regions, and over 90% of the answers coming from people like you and me. It really is the community helping the community.

The first announcement of the keynote was about that community: Charles announced an expanded and unified Microsoft Maker Community, one place for everybody building across Power Platform, Copilot Studio and SharePoint. I’ll be honest, that last part caught my attention, and a few other MVPs around me looked at each other and said “SharePoint?” You can find the new community at aka.ms/MakerCommunity.

Remember that at Microsoft, the engineering teams for Power Platform and Microsoft 365 are now under the same team, and everybody building is now a maker. So I’m really curious to see how those two communities come together. It might even have an impact on next year’s conference, but that’s my personal opinion, and I come back to it at the end.

Better tools: the first demo had no AI at all

Every demo in this keynote was a real use case from a real company. It wasn’t Contoso, where every demo just works all the time. Ryan Cunningham even joked that he’s starting to think those aren’t actually real companies.

The keynote was organized around four pillars: better tools, more makers, no cliffs, and value at scale. And funny enough, while Microsoft keeps saying there’s never been a better time to build with AI, the first demo had no AI at all. It showed the fundamental improvements Microsoft has made for people who build manually.

Power Apps: a pop-out formula bar and faster controls

You can now pop out the formula bar in Power Apps. So when your formula is dozens or hundreds of lines long, you’re not stuck with a small bar to read it in: you can put it beside your screen. Every new control is also more than 30% faster.

Model-driven apps are getting calendar and card views that you set up with just a few clicks. You could build those with code in the past, but now it takes a few clicks, and the calendar looks just like Outlook.

Power Automate: inline action cards and virtual network connectivity

Power Automate got some love too, which made me happy, because it’s my favorite product and I was a bit worried last year that there wasn’t much for it. The designer now has inline action cards, so you can view and edit an action’s parameters right on the canvas instead of in a panel on the left. You see more at the same time, so it’s kind of a modern take on the original designer.

And for my fellow IT pros, virtual network connectivity lets a cloud flow call a service that’s on-premises without you needing to build a custom connector. It’s safe, it’s secure, and it’s easy.

More makers: build Power Apps from Microsoft Copilot

The next pillar was more makers, and this is where AI comes in. In the new Microsoft Copilot (formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot) app, you have the chat you already use, plus Copilot Cowork, Code, and the brand new Autopilot. What’s new is that you can now build Power Apps from Copilot.

Charles even said he’s built more Power Apps in Copilot in the last two months than in the platform directly in the past two years. An app is now his favorite way to share information, rather than a traditional document or a PowerPoint deck.

We saw a demo where a marine underwriter at Markel Insurance, so a business user, built a full app for her team in Cowork just by describing what she wanted. It’s connected to their data, it sends emails through Outlook, it updates records in Dataverse, and sharing it is as easy as sharing a Word document. The person closest to the problem builds the solution, which is what the Power Platform has always been about, just in a more amplified way now.

No cliffs: low-code apps are code underneath

If you’re an IT pro like me, you’re probably thinking: okay, what happens when that app becomes business critical? This is where the no cliffs pillar comes in.

It took me a while to understand what that meant. In the past, there was a big limit to what you could do with no code and low code. Once you reached it, you had to go to pro code, and that was a big cliff to climb, because you couldn’t just keep working on the same app in Visual Studio Code. You had to rebuild it completely.

But behind every low-code app, there’s actually code. So when you build an app with AI, either as a code app or in Copilot Cowork, it’s still code deployed in the back. As soon as you reach your limit as a vibe coder, a developer can connect to it and take your solution to the next level without rebuilding everything.

The keynote even showed a solution built in Copilot Studio that a developer then opened in Visual Studio Code. He asked GitHub Copilot to explain it, and it drew a diagram of the whole solution. It also found that 3 of the last 12 follow-up emails asked suppliers for information they had already given, and the developer fixed that without ever opening the Copilot Studio designer. So even if you never look at it that way in the UI, it’s code in the back, and with AI and the new ways of hosting, that transition is easier than ever.

The Copilot Managed Runtime fixes the localhost:3000 problem

Let’s talk vibe coding, because Ryan had my favorite joke of the keynote: “Check out my cool new app, it’s at localhost 3000. What? That doesn’t work on your machine?” I’m sure that as an IT pro, someone has already shared an app with you that way, whether a colleague or a family member. We’ve all been there.

That’s exactly what the new Copilot Managed Runtime fixes. Whether you build in Cowork, Copilot Studio, Visual Studio Code, or even a third-party tool, you now have a dedicated runtime where you can safely host your apps. It’s hosted by Microsoft, and it follows the policies your admins set.

Makers finally have a way to host vibe coded apps in a secure, enterprise-compliant way. Personally, though, I’m wondering where the line is. When do you keep an app on the managed runtime, where you pay per use with Copilot credits, and when does a developer take it over and put it on Azure Static Web Apps for a fixed price of around $10 a month, so you know exactly what it costs? It’s brand new, so I’m curious to hear what you would do.

Copilot Studio workflows and the GitHub Copilot harness

The keynote also covered the workflows experience in Copilot Studio, which became generally available in August. So it’s not brand new, but it was still interesting to see it live, combining deterministic steps with everything AI, like classifying emails, calling an agent, or even asking Copilot Cowork to add a task.

In the demo, an insurance company’s shared mailbox got classified, the workflow called the right agents and automations, and the whole run, from the email coming in to a quote ready for the underwriter, cost less than 90 cents. Not 90 dollars, 90 cents. You can also test a single step without running the whole workflow, and you can choose to lay it out left to right or top to bottom. Ryan had some strong feelings about that during the keynote, and I suspect that’s why the top-to-bottom option exists now.

Staying with Copilot Studio, the GitHub Copilot harness isn’t new either, but we got numbers on how much better it is. In Microsoft’s testing, with the same model and the same tasks, code analysis went from about 41% to 88% on the new harness, with about 45% fewer input tokens. So your agents get smarter and cheaper at the same time, and that doesn’t happen very often.

Agents get their own identity, mailbox and OneDrive

I think the biggest showcase for a lot of people was agent identity. Until now, Microsoft mostly pitched agent identity to IT pros, as something to manage, rather than as something that makes you more productive.

What we saw at this keynote is that because an agent has its own identity, it has its own mailbox and its own OneDrive. You can chat with it in Teams, add it to a group conversation, email it, or tag it in a Word document exactly as if it were a user. That applies to Autopilot as well: Charles shared that his own Autopilot is named Apollo, and if you look at the org chart at Microsoft, you’ll actually see Apollo reporting to Charles.

Agent identities are rolling out to everyone in Copilot Studio right now.

The first governance demo on a PPCC keynote stage

The keynote closed with something we’ve never had before at a PPCC keynote: a security and governance demo. With everybody building apps, flows and agents right now, you want to make sure you manage them properly. We saw Agent 365 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which isn’t new, but it was good to see it demoed.

My highlight was the Power Platform admin plugin with the Power Platform Advisor. It’s not new this week, but it was the first time I saw it live. It’s like an admin agent for Power Platform admins: you go into Cowork and ask it to build reports on what has been created in your environment. It reminds me of the SharePoint admin agent, but for the Power Platform, and I love that Microsoft is making governance easier for every company. It’s the first thing I want to try back at the office.

What this means for you

If you’re a maker, check out all the new experiences and see the new ways you can create apps and flows with AI, whether you’re building them with AI or putting AI inside them. If you haven’t tried it yet, plans in Power Apps are a good place to start building a whole solution from a prompt. If you have Copilot Cowork at work, try building an app with it. Charles’s idea of building an app or a dashboard to share information, instead of a PowerPoint deck or a Word document, is worth trying. It won’t fit every time, but it’s so much more flexible.

If you’re an IT pro, check out the latest in how to manage your environments. As more makers build apps, flows and agents, you need to keep an eye on them and keep them in check. Try the new Power Platform admin plugin, and see which of the tasks you used to do by hand or with PowerShell you can automate with AI. We’re about to see thousands of apps created every year, so keeping an eye on everything matters more than ever.

PPCC 2027 moves to Chicago

The Power Platform Community Conference is leaving Las Vegas and heading to the Windy City: Chicago, November 2 to 4, 2027. There’s a great promo if you register now, with 50% off and a free workshop if you do it fast, and you can register for the 2027 conference here.

The biggest change for me is the link itself: it’s now a Maker Conference. Charles included SharePoint in the new maker community, so I’m curious whether the 2027 conference will include more SharePoint and Microsoft 365 content, not just Power Platform. Will Microsoft have one big conference? Nothing has been announced yet, but it’s worth thinking about as the definition of a maker, and the tools makers use, keep changing.

Ready to plan your trip to Chicago? I’ll share every new PPCC promo on my Power Platform Community Conference page, so you can register for Chicago at the best price.

AB-410 exam: what to expect, difficulty, and study tips

Vlad Catrinescu — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:58:08 GMT

The AB-410 exam is Microsoft’s new Power Platform certification for the AI era, and after taking it while it was still in beta, I can tell you it does a great job of capturing how big the Power Platform really is. This post breaks down what the AB-410 exam covers, the things that surprised me, and exactly how I would prepare if I were sitting it today. I will not touch anything under NDA, so think of this as pointers on what to study and how to get ready, not a list of questions.

Key takeaways

The AB-410 is the AI-era successor to the PL-200, shifting the persona from Power Platform functional consultant to an app builder who brings AI into the solutions you build.
The exam tests real breadth across Dataverse, model-driven apps, canvas apps, Power Automate, business logic, and AI, not one narrow corner of the platform.
The AI focus is about enhancing apps you have already built, not using AI to generate an app from scratch.
Business process flows, application lifecycle management (ALM), and security show up more than the study guide suggests.
Expect roughly 50% overlap with the PL-200, so existing Power Platform skills carry over, but you will need to skill up on using AI inside the Power Platform.
Microsoft targeted July 2026 for general availability, with a chance it slips into August.

What the AB-410 exam is and where it fits

The AB-410 is the exam for the Microsoft Certified: Intelligent Applications Builder Associate certification. It is part of Microsoft’s new AB series of exams, and it takes the place of the old PL-200. If you searched for the AB-410 and landed here, that is the short version: this is the credential that now sits where the PL-200 used to.

The persona shifted along with the exam code. The PL-200 was aimed at the Power Platform functional consultant. The AB-410 is aimed at an app builder who brings AI into the solutions they build. That is a meaningful change in focus, but the foundation is the same platform, so if you already have a PL-200 background, this is a natural next step rather than a fresh start.

Overall, I really like this exam. It sits at the right level for an associate certification, and more than anything, it reflects how mature and how large the Power Platform has become.

What the AB-410 exam actually tests

You are not tested on just a little slice of the Power Platform. The AB-410 spans Dataverse, model-driven apps, canvas apps, Power Automate, business logic, and the AI pieces that sit on top of all of it. That breadth is the whole point. Passing it says you can build real solutions across the platform, not just configure one feature in isolation.

The official study guide organizes the skills measured into three areas:

Create a foundation for intelligent applications (25 to 30%)
Create intelligent applications (25 to 30%)
Build business application logic and automation (40 to 45%)

That last area carries the most weight, so business logic and automation deserve the bulk of your study time.

How AI really shows up on the exam

Here is the nuance I most want you to walk away with, because it is easy to misread the study guide. The AI on this exam is not really about using AI to build the app for you. The study guide mentions building with natural language and features like generative pages, but in my experience, that was not the bulk of it.

Instead, the AI was about enhancing apps you already built. It was less “AI, go make me an app” and much more “I already have an app, how do I make it smarter?” Personally, I am a big fan of that framing, because it mirrors how enterprises are actually adopting AI today.

The questions also felt like genuine enterprise scenarios rather than throwaway sample apps. That matters, because it means passing the AB-410 says something real about whether you can handle enterprise work.

Three things that surprised me on the AB-410 exam

A few things stood out enough that I want you to prepare for them specifically.

Power Automate is a supporting character, not the star

I was happy to see Power Automate on the exam, but a lot of the Power Automate questions were not really about building inside Power Automate itself. They were about how you use Power Automate from other places, like an app calling a flow. So treat Power Automate as a supporting character in a bigger solution, and study how it connects to apps and data rather than only how to build a flow in isolation.

Business process flows are back

I was surprised by how much business process flows showed up. For the past three or four years, Microsoft has been pulling them out of Power Platform certifications, so it was easy to assume they were fading away. They are not. Business process flows are still essential when you work with data and records, so do not sleep on them.

Do not ignore ALM and security

In the study guide, application lifecycle management is basically one bullet point and security is roughly one line. In practice, both came up exactly as they would on a real project. Make sure you understand solutions, environments, and the security model, even if the study guide makes them look like an afterthought.

How to study for the AB-410 exam

My biggest piece of advice, especially if you already have Power Platform skills, is to take the apps, solutions, and flows you have already built and practice infusing AI into them. Pull up an old lab with an existing solution and ask yourself how you would add small AI features to make it better.

Maybe the app calls a flow, and that flow calls an AI Builder prompt. Maybe you embed the AI directly in the app instead. The study guide files these capabilities under the AI Hub, though many of us still call it AI Builder. Either way, go build a few practice projects that consume both prompts and models, from both an app and a flow.

On top of that, make sure your Dataverse fundamentals are solid. You need the basics like table relationships and views, but also newer pieces like prompt columns.

All of this assumes you already have a solid Power Platform base, because the platform is mature now. If you are truly brand new to everything, do not start here. Start with the PL-900 to build your foundation, then come back for the AB-410.

If you took the PL-200, I would estimate roughly a 50% overlap between it and the AB-410. A lot of your fundamentals around building apps and flows carry straight over. To pass this one, you will need to skill up on using AI inside the Power Platform, and honestly, that is a good thing.

AB-410 exam logistics: format, length, and Microsoft Learn access

A few quick logistics worth knowing before you book. I cannot share the exact number of questions, but Microsoft exams generally land somewhere between 40 and 60. For an associate exam like this one, expect the more advanced question types, including scenarios that have multiple questions attached to them.

One useful thing: you get access to Microsoft Learn right inside the exam, so you have a safety net if you need to look something up. Do not lean on it too heavily, though. The clock is running, and those scenario questions take real time to read, so you still want to know your material cold.

Finally, timing. I took the AB-410 while it was in beta. Depending on when you are reading this, it may already be generally available. Microsoft was targeting July 2026 for general availability, and I would not be surprised if it lands in August instead.

What this means for you

If you are already a Power Platform builder, the AB-410 is a strong target that proves you can bring AI into the apps you build. The fastest path to being ready is to stop studying AI as a separate topic and start layering it onto solutions you already know how to build. That single shift covers most of what makes this exam different from the PL-200.

If you are newer to the platform, resist the urge to jump straight to an associate exam. Earn the PL-900 first, get comfortable with Dataverse, apps, and flows, then return for the AB-410 once the fundamentals are second nature. As a Microsoft MVP who has authored 100+ Pluralsight courses on these technologies, I can tell you that a solid base makes the AI layer far easier to absorb.

On timing, keep an eye on the certification’s status. If it is still in beta when you sit it, your score arrives after the beta period closes and the exam goes live. If it has reached general availability, you get your result the usual way.

Ready to prepare for the AB-410? Start by refreshing the fundamentals this exam builds on. My PL-200 study guide is the best place to see how much carries over, and if you are earlier in your journey, the PL-900 study guide will get your foundation solid before you tackle the AI layer. You can also work through my Power Platform courses on Pluralsight to build hands-on experience with apps, flows, and Dataverse.

Plans in Power Apps: Build a Full Solution With Copilot

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:18:47 GMT

What if you could describe a business app in two sentences and have Copilot build the entire solution for you, the data model, the processes, the apps, and the flows? That is exactly what Plans in Power Apps does. In this walkthrough, you will see how the feature works, what each Copilot agent is responsible for, and what it produces when you feed it a real prompt.

Key takeaways

Plans in Power Apps is a Copilot-first development tool that generates full Power Platform solutions from a natural language prompt.
The plan designer uses multiple Copilot agents (requirements, process, data, and solution) that work together to build user roles, business processes, a Dataverse data model, apps, flows, reports, and agents.
You can add files for additional context, but the plan designer is currently limited to around 4,000 tokens (roughly 3,000 words of text).
Even if you do not ship the generated solution, Plans is useful as a documentation and requirements-gathering starting point for professional developers.
Plans lives inside make.powerapps.com and is one of several Copilot features across the Power Platform.

What are Plans in Power Apps

Plans in Power Apps is a Copilot-first development tool that lets you quickly create full Power Platform solutions starting from a prompt. That includes Dataverse tables, Canvas apps, model-driven apps, Power Pages sites, Power Automate flows, and even Copilot Studio agents. In other words, you describe the business problem, and Plans scaffolds an end-to-end solution across the Power Platform instead of just a single app or a single flow.

The feature lives inside make.powerapps.com, the Power Apps maker portal. You start by writing a plain-language description of what you want to build, and Copilot takes it from there.

How the Plans in Power Apps agents work together

When you work with the plan designer, you are not dealing with a single Copilot. You are orchestrating a set of specialized agents that each own a piece of the solution design. The three primary agents you interact with are requirements, data, and solution, and the designer also surfaces a process step as part of the flow. Here is what each one does.

Requirements agent

The requirements agent takes your prompt and turns it into structured user roles and user stories. For a timesheet app, that means it will identify roles like employee, project manager, and accounting staff, then generate the requirements for each role. You can edit the output before moving on, add more requirements, or approve it as-is.

Process agent

Once the requirements are approved, the process agent maps out the business processes the solution needs. It identifies who does what (the employee, the system, the manager), the conditions that branch the flow, and the happy path versus edge cases. The result is a visual process diagram you can review, edit, and iterate on.

Data agent

The data agent generates the Dataverse data model behind the solution. It proposes tables, columns, and relationships based on the requirements and the processes. For a timesheet scenario, that typically means tables like Employee, Project, Timesheet, Timesheet Approval, and Weekly Report, all connected with the right relationships.

Solution agent

Finally, the solution agent decides which Power Platform components the solution needs. It might recommend a Canvas app for employee self-service, a model-driven app for managers, a Power Automate flow for the approval workflow, and a Power BI report for accounting. Depending on the scenario, it can also suggest Copilot Studio agents. You then click Create on each component to let Copilot build it.

Adding files for context (and the 4,000 token limit)

One of the useful parts of the plan designer is that you can attach files for additional context. That might include process diagrams, data models, screenshots of legacy apps, or any other supporting material you have. Copilot uses these as grounding information when it generates the plan.

There is a current limitation to be aware of. You are capped at roughly 4,000 tokens, which works out to about 3,000 words if your input is text only. If you add images, the math gets harder to pin down, but that ballpark gives you a realistic starting point. For most scoping documents, that is more than enough. For lengthy spec documents, you may need to trim to the most relevant pages.

The plan designer supports file uploads for context, but it is currently limited to around 4,000 tokens (approximately 3,000 words of plain text input).

Demo: Building a timesheet app from a 2-sentence prompt

Here is the exact prompt used in the walkthrough:

I want to create an app in which employees can enter the time spent on certain projects. They need to enter hours weekly, and the project managers need to approve it. The total then gets sent weekly to accounting in a report.

That is it. Two to three short sentences, no technical detail, no field list, no wireframes. Click Generate, and Copilot takes over.

Generating user roles and requirements

The requirements agent runs first. In just a few seconds, it produced three roles: employee, project manager, and accounting staff. For the employee role, it generated requirements like submitting hours worked for specific projects each week, editing submitted hours before approval, and viewing the status of weekly timesheets. You can accept the output or iterate on it before moving forward.

Mapping the business processes

After approving the requirements, the process agent kicks in. For this scenario, it produced two processes: weekly timesheet submission and approval, and weekly reporting to accounting. Opening the first process reveals a full flow diagram with conditions, branches, and participants. You can see exactly who does what (the employee enters hours, the system notifies the manager, the manager approves or rejects, and so on).

Of course, if you were shipping this to production, you would want to spend real time validating the process before accepting it. For a demo, the output is remarkably close to a reasonable first draft.

Generating the Dataverse data model

Next, the data agent generates the tables your solution needs. For the timesheet scenario, that included an Employee table, a Project table, a Timesheet table, a Timesheet Approval table, and a Weekly Report table. The relationships between them are already mapped out.

You can keep asking Copilot to add columns, add tables, or modify relationships. What Copilot produces is not final. You can iterate with it until the model matches what you actually need before moving on to the build step.

Creating the apps and flows

When the solution agent runs, it proposes the concrete Power Platform components. In this walkthrough, that included an employee timesheet portal as a Canvas app, a weekly timesheet approval flow in Power Automate, a project manager review app as a model-driven app, and a weekly report in Power BI. You click Create on each one, and Copilot builds the actual component in the background.

At that point, you have gone from a two-sentence prompt to the scaffold of a working Power Platform solution. Not a single flow, not a single app, but the full stack.

When to use Plans in Power Apps (even if you do not ship the output)

Here is a practical take. Even if you do not use Plans in Power Apps to actually build the final solution, it can be a huge accelerator for the work that happens before the build.

The generated user roles, processes, data model, and component list are essentially a free first draft of your design documentation. You can hand the output to a professional developer as a starting point, let them validate and refine it, and save hours of requirements gathering. For teams that struggle with the boring parts of scoping (writing user stories, drawing process maps, defining entities), that alone is worth the price of admission.

If the business scenario is straightforward and the generated solution is good enough, you can absolutely ship it. For anything production-critical, treat the Copilot output as a first draft and apply the same review you would to any design artifact.

What this means for you

If you build on the Power Platform, Plans in Power Apps changes the starting point for every new project. Instead of opening a blank maker portal and deciding what to build first, you describe the business problem and let Copilot produce a candidate solution across apps, flows, and data.

Practically, there are three places to start. First, try Plans on a small, well-understood scenario you already know the answer to. That will calibrate your expectations for what the output looks like and where it needs human review. Second, use it as a documentation accelerator for projects you plan to build by hand. The process diagrams and data model alone can save real time. Third, keep iterating with Copilot after the first generation. You can refine requirements, adjust the data model, and regenerate components until the plan matches what you actually need.

Having worked with Power Platform environments for over a decade, I can tell you this is one of the biggest shifts in how low-code projects get started. The design phase used to be the slow part. With Plans, the slow part is now the review.

Go deeper with Copilot across the Power Platform

Ready to put Copilot to work across your entire Power Platform stack? Plans in Power Apps is just one of many Copilot features worth knowing. My Pluralsight course covers Copilot in Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, Canvas apps, model-driven apps, and more, with step-by-step demos for each one. Watch the course on Pluralsight.

Knowledge Agent Licensing and Work IQ Explained with Microsoft’s Adam Harmetz

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:34:00 GMT

Microsoft announced a lot at Ignite! From the Knowledge Agent being included with Microsoft 365 Copilot to Work IQ, updates to workflows in SharePoint, and more. But what do these changes actually mean for enterprises?

In this video, I sit down with Adam Harmetz, Vice President of Product Management, Data Science, and Tech Community at Microsoft, to break everything down in plain English so you know exactly how these updates impact your organization.

Here is what we cover:

✅ Knowledge Agent licensing: Who needs a license and how organizations should think about rollout
✅ Work IQ explained: How it relates to Microsoft Graph, how Copilot uses it, and why it is becoming the brain of Microsoft 365
✅ Metadata and AI: How SharePoint metadata improves Copilot and agent responses
✅ SharePoint workflows: The new simplified UX for Power Automate inside SharePoint
📅 What to learn for 2026: Adam’s advice for IT pros, admins, and builders

If you want the clearest explanation of these Ignite announcements and how they affect governance, licensing, and day to day usage, this conversation will save you hours of digging through documentation.

Turn on Knowledge Agent today.

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Video Summary

Metadata finally pays off — Copilot and agents fully understand it now. After years of us telling customers “metadata matters,” AI is proving it. Pre‑cooked metadata means faster, more accurate answers, especially for structured content like invoices or product libraries.
Knowledge Agent + Autofill are now part of the M365 Copilot license. No more confusing SKUs, no more Syntex vs. Premium naming headaches. If you have M365 Copilot, you get the Knowledge Agent and Autofill built in. Non‑licensed uploads may still fall under pay‑as‑you‑go, but the experience is dramatically simpler.
Work IQ isn’t “just Microsoft Graph renamed.” Graph stays the API layer for developers. Work IQ is the intelligence layer — the “brain” of Copilot — adding memory, preferences, inference, and deep understanding of your work. Copilot talks to Work IQ, which pulls what it needs from the Graph.
SharePoint’s new workflow experience = simpler UI + Power Automate engine. No new workflow service! It’s the same Power Automate backend with a friendlier, SharePoint‑first UX and templates for everyday users. And when you need more? There’s always “Edit in Power Automate.”
2026 will be a massive year for builders and agents. Adam’s advice: lean into Knowledge Agent, agent development, Copilot‑powered app building, and solution creation. Microsoft is going all‑in on making 2026 the year makers level up.

For more information, read the transcript below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Microsoft’s biggest conference of the year, Microsoft Ignite, finished just over a week ago, and now we are at ESPC, where we finally have time to deep dive into some of those amazing announcements and really understand what they mean for enterprises. Because there are so many great announcements for SharePoint, today I have the honor of being joined by Adam Harmetz, VP of Product at Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining me.

Good to be here.

You presented at Ignite. You’re presenting four sessions here with the lightning talks and everything, right? You’re a busy man.

Yeah. No, it’s fun. This is a good season to engage with the community, update people, and also recap the year. It’s been a really intense 2025, and so it comes at a good time when we’re figuring out everything we did this year and packaging it all together. It’s been a busy year for sure.

And I think this week you talked about SharePoint’s 25th birthday, so I guess it’s going to be an even busier year ahead.

Yeah. I think 2026 will be a big year for SharePoint. We want to look ahead, not back, but it’s good to celebrate 25 years of community and progress, and a resilient product, and understand why that is, and let it inform where we’re going. We hope the birthday is both a way of celebrating the community and talking about where the product is going, kicking off a big year for us.

I think my favorite memory was the picture you posted on LinkedIn with your friend, the SharePoint Monkey.

Yep.

That was my favorite SharePoint swag ever. I still have the 2010 and 2013 versions.

Yeah. So hopefully we’re going to get a 25-years-of-SharePoint SharePoint Monkey.

I would love that. We need to give ideas to the marketing team.

I know, right? We have this great video. We did this boot camp once when the monkeys were in full swing, and we had like 150 of them we gave out to new hires, and we launched them all at once.

Oh wow—150 monkeys screaming.

That’s something.

After Ignite, you announced a bunch of things, and of course, the community comes to us, MVPs with questions. So hopefully I can ask some of them to you, and you can go a bit deeper into the details. One of the really cool announcements you made this year—and I think you made it official at Ignite—is that agents now fully understand SharePoint metadata. We’ve always known SharePoint metadata is important. You’ve been doing SharePoint for 25 years, so I’m sure you’ve told many customers, but nobody ever wants to do it. What can you tell us about agents and metadata? Does Copilot care about metadata at all?

Yeah. And it’s a great question. The larger story is that it’s becoming clear that pre‑cooking data helps Copilot and agents have better citations. AI can figure out in real time what’s going on and how to respond, but if you can pre‑cook the data, that’s even better. If you have a list of invoices—say 100,000—and you want to figure out the expenses across all of them, AI can go into every invoice and extract the expenses, but that will take a long time. What you want is to pre‑cook the data. You want to pull that information out and have it indexed so AI can respond quickly.

I’ve never heard the term “pre‑cook” before.

Well, it’s an old concept recast in the era of AI. I’m trying to make sure people understand the story arc from before to after. Extracting metadata helps humans, filters, and views—but it also allows AI to respond faster and more accurately. We’re looking at our internal emails to evaluate the value of metadata, and early results suggest it helps AI respond better on the first try. Without metadata, AI can still find the answer, but sometimes it takes multiple turns before it reaches the correct response. If you have a structured repository with good metadata, you get the answer better the first time.

Metadata isn’t necessary for every document across the enterprise, but for structured, high‑value repositories—product libraries, invoices—it’s extremely useful.

There are two sides to this. One: The Knowledge Agent can extract that metadata automatically. And two: now agents—and soon Copilot—understand that metadata. So when you ask a question where the answer is in that metadata, they can respond. For example, “What’s the highest invoice in this library?” is something you can ask an agent right now, and very soon you’ll be able to ask Copilot.

Okay, so right now it’s in SharePoint agents as we’re recording this, but as we go into the new calendar year, it will be in Copilot Chat and all Copilot experiences.

Yeah, exactly. That is the vision, and we’re already done coding it. We’re just rolling it out.

That’s amazing. I had a SharePoint Premium workshop on Monday where we added metadata to invoices, and then we could compare invoices directly in the Knowledge Agent. That was pretty cool.

Yeah. It’s exciting. And even beyond that, we have new capabilities, like Copilot being able to create a list. That’s another great example of using metadata. There’s a whole ecosystem around lists, libraries, metadata, agents, and Copilot that is coming together. We’re very far along, and we’ll get the rough edges smoothed out in the first few months of 2026.

Entering metadata has always been painful. Was it two years ago that Autofill columns were released? We had the SharePoint Syntex models before, but Autofill is way easier and way cooler. AI fills the metadata for us 95% of the way, and we only fix the rest. At Ignite, you also had a cool announcement about how everyone can now use the Knowledge Agent. No more excuses, right?

Yes. Basically, we’ve had Syntex and SharePoint Premium. I take responsibility for the naming changes—Microsoft Syntex, etc. Part of that evolution is tied to how AI and Copilot became the center of gravity. Customers asked us to simplify. So we merged Autofill with the Knowledge Agent, and then merged the Knowledge Agent into the Copilot license. It’s all one thing now. The Copilot license includes a bunch of out-of-the-box agents, one of them being the Knowledge Agent. And Autofill is included. Everyone with Copilot benefits.

Awesome. So just to confirm: as soon as you have Microsoft 365 Copilot, once Knowledge Agent goes GA—hopefully in January—everyone with Copilot gets it?

We haven’t announced a date. We’re targeting early next year. Public preview is off by default, so please turn it on and give feedback. We’re watching the data closely. We’re being quality‑driven, but we think we can track to that timeframe.

By the way, for admins: since November 5, we can turn it on with opt‑in at the site level. No more enabling it tenant‑wide and then opting out thousands of sites. Now we can just opt in on a few sites to test.

Yeah. We planned to have that at public preview, but something missed the train and caught up later. We prefer people turn it on everywhere—it is the AI mode for SharePoint sites—and it only impacts users with Copilot licenses. But we know some departments want to test it first.

Eventually, when it reaches GA, it will be on by default, but you can turn it off if needed.

Exactly. That’s the plan, though it will be finalized closer to GA. Like many AI features, we think it should be on by default.

I want to deep dive into licensing because not everyone has a Copilot license yet. Some people use pay‑as‑you‑go or Copilot Chat, included in Microsoft 365. Who needs the Copilot license? The person creating the columns? Uploading the document?

Great question. During preview, the Autofill column part of the Knowledge Agent is included for everyone with a Copilot license. So you can create columns, and if you upload a document, it will be processed by Autofill for free. If a non‑licensed user uploads a document, Autofill will only process it if pay‑as‑you‑go is set up, and it will be billed accordingly. Things are still in preview and will be documented more clearly at GA. The big picture is that the Knowledge Agent is included with the Copilot license.

Makes sense. I know you don’t want the same issues we had with the Syntex per‑user license.

Yeah. Syntex is awesome—the scenarios live on—but both we and customers wanted fewer things done better, all under the Copilot license.

Now let’s switch to something even more basic. At Ignite, you announced Work IQ. From the description, people said, “Wait—that’s Microsoft Graph. Did they rename Microsoft Graph?” What’s the relationship between Graph and Work IQ?

You’re right. Since the Delve days—and even before—we used “Graph” to refer to the intelligence layer of Microsoft 365, and also to the API/data layer. The developer‑focused API access remains Microsoft Graph; that isn’t changing.

We needed a new term for the intelligence layer—the brain of Microsoft 365—especially in the AI era. Work IQ clarifies how important this layer is.

Work IQ is more expansive than how we used “Graph” before. It includes memory and inference. For example, it remembers your preferences: if you prefer concise responses from Copilot, or if you use a specific tone when emailing certain people. That was never part of the original Graph vision. Over time, Work IQ will expand into group memory and concepts.

So for developers, Graph is still Graph. For business users, Work IQ is the brain of Copilot.

So if I’m explaining Copilot to a business user, I’d say: Copilot talks to Work IQ, which calls the Graph to get your work data.

Yeah, that’s right.

We also recently took some new Copilot exams, so it’ll be interesting to see how those get updated after Ignite.

We don’t just want Work IQ to be another Microsoft term to memorize. It’s critical to Copilot’s differentiated value. Customers will choose tight integration between productivity, the content system, the intelligence layer, and the AI experiences built on top. Work IQ really is the brain of Copilot.

And you showed that at Ignite in Jeff Teper’s session—the difference between ChatGPT connected to SharePoint and M365 Copilot. Copilot understands the content more deeply than external services using only connectors.

Yeah. Connectors are important for external repositories, but for core productivity data—documents, email, chats—connectors are a thin straw. They don’t have a deep understanding.

For example, we’ve generated thumbnails for every PowerPoint slide for years. We send those slide thumbnails to the LLM so it has visual references. That allows Copilot to answer questions like, “Who is the CEO in this org chart?” because it can actually see the slide. That depth of integration beats connector strategies hands‑down.

One final question. At Ignite, you announced SharePoint Designer—just kidding. But you did announce a new, simpler way to do workflows directly in SharePoint. Can you clarify whether it’s a different service than Power Automate, or just a simpler way to interact with Power Automate?

It’s the latter. It’s completely coordinated with Teams, built on the same codebase. It’s a new, simpler UX designed for productivity scenarios, built on top of Power Automate.

Over the past years, we’ve had different ways of integrating with Power Automate. Sometimes, simple things we built ourselves, sometimes templates, sometimes automation kicked off automatically. This new experience says: the right strategy is one workflow system—Power Automate. We love Power Automate, but the UX was too complex for the average SharePoint or Teams user.

So we created a front‑end UX with a healthy number of templates that match the simplicity we want for those users. Everything has an “Edit in Power Automate” button, so you can round‑trip it. Think of it as expanding templates and simplifying the UX so workflows are easy to set up.

Eventually, it will replace the custom rule engine we have today?

That’s the intention. Whether there are still two systems under the hood for technical reasons is TBD, but conceptually, for end users, yes.

That’s awesome. You have a “get started” experience and then advanced editing in Power Automate for those who need it.

Yeah. It took longer than expected—it was a big joint project across Microsoft—but it feels right, especially in the AI era, since there’s already a natural‑language box for creating or assigning a template.

One final question for you. As we head into 2026, what should people learn? If there were one or two features you wish every company would try, what would they be?

The Knowledge Agent is transformative for end users and site owners. Try it, especially during public preview. Second, it’s a great time to be a maker and builder. Agent development is here now. App Builder was announced around Ignite. More is coming in SharePoint next year. Skill up on agent development and building solutions. Expect 2026 to be a year of agent development, solution development, and vibe coding integrated deeper into productivity experiences.

Thank you so much for your time. For everybody watching, please connect with Adam—he’s very active on LinkedIn with an amazing blog around product management and managing teams: Mind the Beat. The link will be in the description below. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more conference interviews, like the video and subscribe to the channel. See you at the next one.

Low Code Is Dead? How AI Is Rebuilding the Power Platform

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:44:00 GMT

Is low code really “dead”… or is the Power Platform just evolving? In this interview from the Power Platform Community Conference, I sit down with Microsoft MVP Victor Dantas to break down how AI is reshaping the way we build apps, websites, and automations.

We walk through a real customer service scenario and show how to go from blank canvas to working solution using AI across the stack.

In this video, you’ll see how to:
✅Use Power Platform Plan Designer and prompts to generate a full data model and model-driven app
✅Turn a blank Power Pages site into a Dynamics-style portal using AI-generated CSS, HTML, and
✅charts Offload 90% of the heavy lifting to GitHub Copilot while still staying in control of the architecture
✅Use MCP connections to Dataverse and Azure DevOps so Copilot understands your tables, work items, and context

Want to learn from more pros? Learn from some of the top talent around the world at Microsoft Community Conference, and get $150 off with discount code VLAD150! Have questions? Check out my Microsoft Conference FAQ!

OR if you live in Europe, I highly recommend the European Power Platform Conference (EPPC)! Good news! I also have a discount code for this event too! Save 15% on any EPPC pass with code VladSpecial!

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Video Summary

“Low Code is Dead” – But Not Really. Microsoft shook the community by announcing “Low Code is dead” during the Power Platform keynote. The real message? Low code isn’t gone—it’s evolving. The Power Platform is being reborn in the era of AI.
AI Is the New Superpower for Makers. Instead of dragging controls and writing endless formulas, makers can now leverage AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to generate CSS, HTML, and even full components for Power Pages—turning a blank template into a polished, Dynamics 365-style site.
Prompts Are Your New Programming Language. Detailed prompts are key. Victor demonstrated how he used AI to create case deflection logic, dashboards, and reusable components—all by describing what he wanted in natural language. Knowing how to prompt is now as important as knowing code.
MCP Changes the Game. The introduction of MCP (Microsoft Copilot Protocol) allows GitHub Copilot to understand your Dataverse environment and Azure DevOps tasks. This means AI can generate context-aware code, suggest solutions, and even help you complete work items without leaving VS Code.
The Future of Power Platform = AI + Makers. The Future of Power Platform = AI + Makers

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Low code is dead. At least that’s what Microsoft just announced at the Power Platform Community Conference during the keynote. And I know that might be scary for you. It’s scary for me too. But that’s why I’m lucky enough to be joined by Victor Dantas, Microsoft MVP and author of The Power Platform Playbook for Digital Transformation. Victor, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I’m excited.

What was your reaction when Microsoft said in the keynote that low code is dead? I was shocked to hear it from the VP of Power Platform. But the way I took it, when he said low code is dead, I think we could tie the bow in that particular sentence if we had a little bit of a sentence that said, “But Power Platform isn’t. Power Platform is reborn.” I think that’s what they said. Isn’t that a beautiful way to say it?

But today, what I would like you to show me and everybody else here that kind of saw that slide “Low code is dead” is how it is reborn. And I know you’ve shown this week some beautiful demos on how you can use AI and not only in the Microsoft ecosystem, but outside as well, to build cool stuff.

That’s correct. Yes. Yes. Let’s do it. I’m excited to present it. There is a lot of chatter in the community about whether or not low code is dead. I believe it’s not necessarily dead, but things are changing for sure, and it’s important for people to stay in the know so that they don’t get left out when the boat leaves. The only constant in IT is change. That is correct. A lot of industry leaders and community leaders posted a similar sentence a few months back, in which they said low code is dead. And it was a thought-provoking set of posts to instill all of us to rethink the way we do our work. So if low code is dead, what is the new thing? What is the Power Platform being reborn into, if you will? So this is something we’re going to take a look at here today.

And I see we’re starting in the famous Plan Designer. That is correct. So what we are going to do—and this is actually a segue or a takeaway from the sessions that I presented here at the Power Platform Conference—is build a fully functional customer service solution that includes a model-driven application and a website with the help of AI. Of course, because we are bound by time here on this video—I’m sure you can talk about it for eight hours. You technically did in your workshop. I did. So this is my eight-hour workshop in, what, twenty minutes maybe? Let’s set it as a challenge. What can we build in twenty minutes?

Hey, let’s take a look at it. But in all fairness, even if we don’t show all the things that are involved in this process, I’ll show you the key pieces so that you can play with them yourself. And at the end of the video, I’ll show you a link where you can download some of the materials to do the same thing yourself. Okay. Awesome. Is that cool? Sounds like a plan. Are we ready? See what I did there? Very good. Very good. Very nice.

So, for this solution, what we are doing is I have a developer environment. And I have crafted a prompt or a set of prompts ahead of time. S,o for this prompt—and I hope Microsoft will not get mad at me—what we are doing is this: we are telling Plan Designer to create a customer service solution similar to Dynamics 365 for Customer Service using the following tables or attributes. For attributes, I’m referencing Microsoft’s Learn website to give me inspiration for what I need to build. Awesome. So I’m using intelligence that’s already available there. That’s the goal, right? You have the intelligence. You already have the data. Leverage it.

If you do that at home, you end up with a model that has a few tables that resemble what you would get from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service experience. So we’ll fast forward to the model-driven app itself. Here on the second tab in this model-driven app, I have cases. Cases reference customers, and then you have a field for description, and so on—everything that you would see in Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. Of course, with the Microsoft product, you get their own Copilot and a lot of other automation. But for a company that is starting in their journey within Power Platform, maybe this solution would work for them—a simple customer service application. Here you have the description of the issue. People can provide a resolution. If the resolution is associated with an article, they can select an article. They can navigate to the business process.

And this is something that—I know we did a bit of a cooking show, I like to call it. We kind of started it, and then we got the app out of the oven. This is what you got right after you ran the prompt with Plan Designer, right? Exactly. So the Plan Designer will suggest the set of tables that you want to create, but it will also provide you insight as to the applications and automation or even a Copilot that would help you fulfill the mission of this particular solution. Awesome. Yeah. So you get it all with one shot. Of course, you can refine things a little bit, and we’ll leave that for another day. But the mission is: the company now has a model-driven application that can be used for service request management or case management.

Awesome. All right. So the next part of the deal is: what if I need to build a website that people can use—my external customers can use—to submit tickets? Oh, that’s awesome because this would be the internal one, but you also need customers to interact, see their own tickets, and things like that. Exactly. So, Plan Designer gives you a starting point for websites as well. But because my workshop was centred on Power Pages techniques, I decided to use a blank template for it and build it from scratch. You’re very brave. But here’s the catch, though. I told this in the workshop and in my sessions: I don’t consider myself lazy. I think I like to get work done. I’m focused. But I like that AI can do a lot of the work for me.

So in that way, I take a little bit of the accusation of being a little lazy. But how did we start the process? You can create a site if you go to make.powerapps.microsoft.com. That’s how you get a site started. And again, we can look into detail,l maybe in another video. But what you end up with when you create a site is something that looks like this.

Not very pretty.

No, that’s about my skills in Power Pages. That’s how I can make it look. So the tagline for my workshop is “From Blank to Beauty.”

Oh, I love it.

Because you start with a blank template and you end up with something a lot nicer. Now this is what the site will look like in the end. So let me click on it and see the result. Do you think this is a website or a model-driven app?

It looks like a model-driven app.

But this is a Power Pages website.

Wow.

So the next stage for me to go from blank to a site that looks like a model-driven app is to use AI intelligence to help me fill in the blanks. So okay, I know that Power Pages runs on top of Bootstrap 5, so I have a little bit of technical insight into it. So what I can do is I can ask—be it ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot—you can ask it to give you a CSS file that will help your site look like a Dynamics 365 first-party application.

Nice. And as you said, you don’t have to use Copilot—you can use whatever you like.

Whatever you like—ChatGPT, whatever you like. And this is what my prompt looked like for it. I know people don’t really enjoy the old and famous Notepad, but this is what I have put in place for that prompt, and that was done in ChatGPT.

Okay.

Now, a little extra sauce here for folks who are starting this journey—be it for Power Pages or any development that they’re doing. You can upload images to ChatGPT and ask GPT to infer from the image while creating this asset. So for my CSS, besides the prompt, I added a screenshot of the D365 Customer Service. “Hey, give me CSS for something that looks like this.”

Exactly.

Nice.

Yep. And it will look at colors, do the translation—the colors that it sees in the image—to HTML code colors, hexadecimal colors. It will do all of it for you.

Wow.

Okay. So this is the prompt that I used, and again, I used ChatGPT to get it.

Okay.

In the end, I got a CSS file. I’m not sure if we should go into details on the CSS, and I’ll have this demo available for you—you can see that there are about 300 lines of CSS code that make your site look like a model-driven app built or used within Dynamics 365.

Cool.

All right.

Yeah.

So the next thing we said was, “Okay, I like this a lot. Give me some components that also look like Dynamics 365.” Meaning the ribbon—the ribbon area that you see here is very similar to what you see in D365.

It’s the same.

Yep. And so this is what we have done. We asked GPT to do that. It gives us results in HTML format. I took that, and I put it on the site.

Wow.

Okay. So the next thing that I showed people was, “Okay, you like the CSS, you like the way it looks—it’s already a game changer when it comes to Power Pages and how it’s presented—but what if I want to create extra automation that’s not shipped out of the box?”

Yeah.

So the first example that we had was: if I want to create a case, or if a user—an external user—wants to create a case or navigates to the Create Case page, what can I do to prevent the user from creating the case but still receiving information to solve the case without having to engage with our backend people, right? That’s called case deflection. We came up with a prompt for it, and let’s take a look at the prompt first.

You’re very detailed in your prompt. I love it.

And the reason why—and we’ll see why we do this, especially for ChatGPT—we have to be detailed because GPT does not have insight into the model, the tables that we’re using. So we are giving a lot of details there. But so here’s the prompt: in a Power Pages site, when a user types more than five characters, take the value on the input field and then run a query behind the scenes to find knowledge-based articles with this keyword.

Yeah. And I see you have results inside the div classes—everything.

So I’m giving all the details. Again, I’m giving the details to GPT because, again, it’s not yet able to see what’s behind the scenes. But there is a way that the prompts will get a lot shorter, and we will see that here today. That’s why I don’t think low code is dead.

Okay, cool.

But Power Platform is reborn. All right. So I took this prompt, ran this prompt, got the results, took the code, and the feature looks like this. So if I type “password,” then I get the results here, and users can see the knowledge-based articles.

That is beautiful.

Help them fix the situation.

That’s amazing.

Yep. And then the last demo that I did was dashboards. So we said, “I like the forms. I like that we can use out-of-the-box Power Pages forms and lists.” This is what you see down below—the list here. This is all out-of-the-box Power Pages. But I wanted to add some charts.

Yeah, I wanted to make this thing look nice. I want it to feel like I am in the Dynamics 365 first-party app. So I said, “All right, let’s craft a prompt that will give us these results.” Again, the prompt is very lengthy and verbose, and I’m giving lots of details here as to what the data model looks like, what the option set values for the statuses and different attributes. So I bake all of that into this prompt, and the result, as you can see, is that we got charts that are animated. If I reload the page, we see a little bit of animation, and it’s doing all the work for you.

That is really cool.

And all of that, you didn’t actually open up Visual Studio Code at all. Well, you needed a bit to know what div to put it in and things like that. So, there’s still some knowledge needed there, but you outsourced 98% of the work to AI.

Yes, 100%. I mean, a lot of the work of pasting the code there was manual. Yes, but it was just grabbing it from GPT and placing it within Power Pages. So the demo in Power Pages—you can edit pages in the browser using VS Code.dev. So that is the strategy we use. But the part that I’m most excited about—both the keynote and where things are going—is what you can do from VS Code for the desktop.

Can we do that still? How are we doing, time?

Oh, we got time. We go.

Of course.

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. All right. So, in Visual Studio Code—or in VS Code—what I did is I downloaded the contents of my website. The presentation will showcase how you can do that. And now all of your assets are in your local machine. For those who are careful with source code and all that, it’s a game-changer because you’re pulling it down to your machine. If the folder is bound to a GitHub repo, then now everything’s taken care of, right? But I did that. I brought the contents of the site to my local machine.

And then from here, now, because I have the files here, I have GitHub Copilot on the side, I can do all kinds of different things. The first thing—the first advantage of having it all here—is that you can include Power Pages AI intelligence as a participant in the conversation. So it knows when I start engaging a conversation with GitHub Copilot that the answers have to be somewhat bound.

Yeah. Like, don’t give me random code that will not work. Like, don’t use your imagination too much—it has to work in Power Pages.

Exactly. So we are putting that boundary there for the conversation. The other thing that I’ve done and I demoed is this—and this to me, if you’re watching this video and maybe you fast-forward to see some solutions or you watch it all and you miss some parts of it—the most important thing in this video is the keyword MCP. Remember this—tattoo it to your forehead or something. Don’t forget it. MCP. So I have configured an MCP connection to Dataverse here and another one to Azure DevOps.

What that allows me to do is I can now talk with GitHub Copilot with the understanding that it knows what’s going on in my Dataverse environment. And this is not only good for Power Pages, though. This is good for any kind of development Power Platform. So if you’re coding a plugin, if you’re coding JavaScript automation for model-driven apps, so on and so forth, it’s got that intelligence here.

So that is the Dataverse MCP. The other MCP here—the Azure DevOps MCP—the way it helps me is, at first, you know, at first level or level one, is that it can tell me what tasks I have to work on, right? If I have visibility into Azure DevOps, if I have tasks assigned to my name, I now know what those tasks are. I don’t have to open three, four, ten thousand browser windows—focused in one, focused in my work, right? So I can run queries like, “Show me all the work items that are assigned to me today.”

And then from there, the MCP has visibility into the details of the task. So I could do things like, “Based on the success criteria for this particular task, write some code.” Based on the people that exist—you have your objective—and then you work with GitHub Copilot to actually… You can have code to start with, and maybe the full solution without even knowing what was assigned for you for work.

This is amazing. Okay, this is crazy. So I have in the demo—I have some commands, not sure how MCP will behave here at the MGM—but some of the important commands, at least for me within the Dataverse MCP, are “describe table.” And let’s see if this is going to work for us.

I will reference the MCP here just in case it doesn’t know in context—help it as much as possible—and let’s see what it comes. But in theory, in your day-to-day, you don’t have to reference it like that. It’s usually smart enough, but no,w just because we’re recording, we want to help it as much as possible. We want to make sure that it works. I found it running “describe table.” It says the MCP server is there.

And okay, it’s helping us. So it’s listing the tables first. Ah, so it said, “Hey, you asked me to describe a table, but I’m not sure which one. Let me list them, and then I’ll describe them.” And guess what? In my environment, because it’s a developer environment, I don’t have the incident table, which is the out-of-the-box case table for Dynamics 365 for Customer Service. But it detected that I have a custom table called “case” as well. But it gave me the internal name of the table, the fields, the attribute types, the choices and whatnot. So from here, if I want, I can go back to my prompts and now skip to a prompt that’s a lot easier. I can say, “Hey, I love that it doesn’t only say, here’s the code.”

It’s like, “Hey, this is what you need to do. This is why I did it, and this is what I was thinking about.” So that part is awesome.

And for folks who are starting in Power Pages specifically, you could go into GitHub Copilot and say, “Okay, I see a lot of code here. It’s a full HTML page, right? There is quite a bit of code, but we could come back here and say things like, Hey, help me fragment this code so that they can become reusable components.”

How can I do that? And then it would explain what you need to do to achieve your result. Okay, so back to Charles’ declaration—if we go back to the beginning, low code as we know it, it’s dead in my opinion. I mean, I don’t think there is a way back to drag-and-drop and Power Fx formulas everywhere and trying to adjust that way. But I don’t think the Power Platform is dead as well. I think those are two separate things, as they put it very well. The Power Platform has been reborn. The Power Platform is reborn in the era of AI.

But thank you so much. I think this is really eye-opening on how many awesome things you can do now as a maker with minimal knowledge of code. You still might need to know a little bit of HTML, a little bit of CSS, but if you know how to prompt and you know the right tools, you can create something. I never thought I’d be able to create something as awesome just using AI. So that is amazing.

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate this peek into the future of low code, really. For those who want to know more about the book, can you tell me a bit what your book covers in 30 seconds, and why people need to read it?

Okay, so Chris and I—Chris Huntingford and I—we had this idea of putting a little bit of our knowledge, or maybe lots of our knowledge, into a book. We felt like every initial business conversation or even community conversation, we felt like we were repeating ourselves a lot of times. And we thought maybe we could put some of our lessons—the lessons learned—into a book format. So in this playbook, if you will, people will be able to see a lot of our story reflected there, and it’s centered on projects and people and building teams more so than the technology itself. I think the technology will evolve, and there will always be new things and new ways of doing the same thing, but how you form the team, what part or what key members you need, and so on and so forth. So that is the idea.

Awesome. Thank you so much. So, for everybody, I don’t know about you, but that sounds awesome. I’ll add it to my reading list. You’ll have a link to the book in the description below, as well as all of Victor’s social media. He’s super active on X, on LinkedIn, almost everywhere, and with really awesome pictures as well of Agent. So you’re not going to get bored if you connect with him—and lots of great insights as well.

Thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. And for those of you watching, if you enjoyed it, again, make sure you connect with Victor. And like the video and subscribe to the channel for more awesome content like this one. On the screen right now, we talked about the keynote. You’ll have a link to the keynote summary I did. So if you missed that, you can have all the announcements in less than 10 minutes as well. So I hope I’ll see you there.

Power Apps + Power Automate: Better Together | Create PDFs Without Premium Connectors

Vlad Catrinescu — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Want to generate PDFs from Power Apps using Power Automate without paying for premium connectors? In this real-world demo, Microsoft MVP Laura Rogers shows how to build a Statement of Work generator using Power Apps, Power Automate, OneDrive, and SharePoint — with no code and no extra license requirements!

Check out Laura’s training courses.

Video Summary

Power Apps + Power Automate = Better Together. Each Power Platform product is powerful on its own, but combining them unlocks real business solutions. Laura showed us how easy it is to integrate them without overcomplicating things.
You Don’t Always Need a Flow. Common tasks like sending emails or updating multiple lists can often be done directly in Power Apps using connectors or patching—no flow required! Keep it simple when you can.
When You Do Use a Flow, Keep It Lean. Laura’s demo used a Power Apps trigger and passed just one parameter—the project ID. From there, the flow grabbed all the data it needed, generated an HTML file, converted it to PDF via OneDrive (free!), and saved it in SharePoint.
Smart UI Design Matters. The Power App showed progress while the flow ran, then revealed the “View PDF” button only when the file was ready. Wrapping the flow call in a variable and using conditional visibility made the experience smooth and intuitive.
Training and learning resources are key. Laura offers over 45 hours of training on Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, and more at iwmentor.com. If you want to build solutions like this, her courses are a fantastic resource!

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

OR if you live in Europe, I highly recommend the European Power Platform Conference (EPPC)! Good news! I also have a discount code for this event too! Save 15% on any EPPC pass with code VladSpecial!

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Transcript

Each product inside the Power Platform is amazing on its own, but most enterprises get even more value when they use them together. What if we try to use two of my favorite products in the Power Platform—Power Automate, number one in my heart, and Power Apps, a close second—together to build a real business solution?

Today, I’m super happy to be joined by Microsoft MVP and good friend Laura Rogers. Laura, thank you so much for being here.
“Thanks for having me.”

Today we’re at the Power Platform Community Conference recording this, and this week you had a session called Power Automate and Power Apps Better Together. I think that was the title, right?
“Yes.”

And you told me right before recording that you showed something really cool and that there are different ways to actually integrate them. So what I want you to show me is everything about this because usually I only do the Power Automate stuff. I want to learn how people call it from Power Apps.
“Okay. Well, you may notice that when you’re in Power Apps, you actually have a Power Automate section that lets you integrate Power Apps and Power Automate. But my whole session was really about the concept of all the other ways that you can use this integration without having to use that specific way.”

A couple of things that I went over were: you can send emails directly from a Power App using the Office 365 Outlook connector, and write some functions so that it instantly goes straight from the Power App without needing a flow. That’s one common thing that people think they need a flow to do.

Another thing is you can just use patching. So if you had a situation where somebody fills out a form and you need to not just submit that one form, but maybe create a couple of other things in other lists automatically, you can just use patching from your Power App. Those are common things that people might need to automate, and again, you can avoid using a flow altogether.

But even if you do need a flow, you could still do it a different way. You could have a flow that triggers when the item gets created in SharePoint, Dataverse, or wherever your item is. Your trigger can just be based on the item getting created or modified. So yet again, you don’t need to use this integration for any of those scenarios.

That’s a big question I had in my workshop on Sunday. People asked me this exact scenario: Is it better to do it from the Power App or from the data source? And I’m the team data source. This way it’s a bit more separate. If something needs to be debugged, I have two different systems—one that saves into SharePoint and one that triggers in SharePoint. I’m more team “keep them separate.” But I guess it depends on the scenario.
“It definitely does. I like to try and keep it as simple as possible—have fewer moving pieces. So in situations where I can just have a command that sends an email straight from the app and that’s all that’s needed, something simple, if you only have one action, absolutely.”

So yeah, it’s definitely a per-situation decision that you’re going to make.
“Yeah.”

Well, you told me you built something cool in your session—a full process.
“Yes. So I’ll go ahead and run it and then show you what it does, and then we’ll dig in and I’ll show you how I built it. So again, I was talking about all these reasons not to use this integration, but here’s a good example. I have customers and a list of customers in here, and then each customer has a list of projects. So here are all the Adventure Works projects. For each project, I can go to the form with all the information about that project. And then here’s where the magic happens: I’m working with a new customer, I’ve got a new project, and I need to generate a new statement of work. So I just click ‘Create Statement of Work.’”

You can see the little dots going across. What it’s doing is kicking off a flow that’s creating a file, putting the data about that project in the file, and then converting it to PDF. It just finished running, so now this little “View PDF” button appears.
“Okay, wow, it already opened.”
“Yeah. So there is the statement of work that it just generated based on the data in that form, and now it’s a PDF file.”

That is really awesome because in the UI, you can see that it’s working, and then the other button appears at the end.
“That is really cool. Can you add a loading screen?”
“Yeah, you could.”
“Can you get the ‘Working on it’ GIF? You know, remember the SharePoint ‘Working on it’ GIF?”
“Oh yes.”
“Can you add that in there?”
“There is actually a control in Power Apps that does that functionality.”

So it took me to where the file was created in SharePoint. That’s the library where it got created. So that’s how it works. Now let’s go look at what the flow is actually doing.

This flow is based on the trigger called “When Power Apps calls a flow.” You decide what information you want to send over from the Power App to the flow. The simplest way is you don’t need to send all these separate fields—if you have the ID of the item, that’s all you need. So all I’m sending over is the project ID from the Power App.

The flow uses the “Get Item” action to retrieve all the data about that project. Since this is a parent-child relationship (a customer might have multiple projects), I have a lookup field in the project to the customer. So then I do another “Get Item” to get that one customer using the customer lookup ID. Now I have all the information about the project and the customer, and I can use all that in my statement of work.

What I did was create an HTML file—a simple, no-frills, no-premium-connector way of generating a file. I used Copilot to create the HTML for me because I didn’t feel like writing all this code. I told Copilot to create a statement of work in HTML and gave it a list of all the fields I wanted to insert. It wrote the HTML and put placeholders where the parameters would go. I pasted that code into a Compose action, inserted the fields like customer name, project start, project end, and project description, and then used the free “Convert to PDF” option in OneDrive.

So I create the HTML file temporarily in OneDrive, then use the Convert File action to convert it to PDF. After conversion, I create the PDF file in my Statement of Work library in SharePoint using the file name and content. I also created a sharing link for that file because it’s more reliable across devices. One thing I forgot to add is deleting the temporary OneDrive file so they don’t pile up.

Finally, I respond back to the Power App with the sharing link. In Power Apps, the button uses flow.run() syntax to call the flow. To wait for the flow and get information back, you wrap it in a variable using the Set function. Then, when the variable is populated with the URL, the “View PDF” button appears. I also set the display mode so the button grays out after use.

For the back button, I clear the variable so the next time you open another project, it doesn’t show the previous link.

That’s the whole solution: kicking off the flow, waiting for it to come back, and making the UI interactive so users only see what works.

I love how cool you built it—it looks so simple now. At first, I thought it would be complicated with a lot of steps, but this was super easy.
“Oh, great. I’m glad you liked it.”

One final question: Do you do Power Automate training like me?
“Yes.”
“What do you think about Microsoft moving the actions back under, like in classic?”
“Oh, they’re changing the interface. You missed the keynote—they’re bringing it back like in classic instead of being on the left. Being able to see all that information, especially in training screenshots, is huge. I love that.”
“I like it, but I feel like I have to update a lot of things now.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s so true. We both do. By the end of the year, the actions will be under a classic-like designer but with a modern look.”

Thank you so much. You mentioned you do a lot of training—can you tell everybody where they can find it?
“Sure. My company is IWmentor, which stands for Information Worker Mentor. It’s iwmentor.com. I have about 45+ hours of training on SharePoint, Power Apps, Power Automate, OneDrive, Planner, Copilot, Microsoft Forms, Microsoft Lists, and more. I have advanced classes and an Ultimate plan that includes everything. You can subscribe monthly or yearly. I have a huge Cyber Monday sale coming up with a 40% discount.”

Awesome. I’ll make sure to have a link in the description below so you can access it easily. If you want to build cool things like this in a simple way, check it out. If you’re a business professional or information worker, there’s no better training out there. Thank you so much for your time.

For everybody here, if you enjoyed this video, please like it, subscribe to the channel, and on the screen right now, you’ll see another video we recorded at the Power Platform Community Conference. See you there.

Power Platform Reborn in the AI Era | Top #PPCC25 Keynote Announcements

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 11:42:00 GMT

The 2025 Power Platform Community Conference keynote just wrapped up — and Microsoft dropped some MAJOR news.

From “low code is dead” to the AI-powered rebirth of the Power Platform, this video breaks down all the key announcements from Charles Lamanna’s keynote — in just 15 minutes.

Here’s what you’ll learn:
✅ New Power Platform growth stats
✅ Copilot Studio updates + new logo
✅ New AI Agents — Data Entry, Data Exploration & Code Agents
✅ Generative Pages and how they change app creation
✅ Updated Power Automate Designer & Agent Flows
✅ New Copilot Studio Testing Tools + M365 Copilot Agents

If you’re building with Power Apps, Power Automate, or Copilot Studio, this recap will get you up to speed on everything new — and why it matters.

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight.

Video Summary

Low-code is evolving, not dying. Microsoft declared that “low-code as we know it is dead” — but don’t panic! It’s being reborn with AI at the core. Makers now use AI-infused tools to build full-stack apps faster, smarter, and with less manual effort. You can still drag and drop, but now you can also tweak the React code behind the scenes if needed.
Copilot Studio is booming. Usage exploded from 50,000 to 200,000 organizations in just a year! To celebrate, Microsoft gave it a fresh new logo (and yes, Charles Lammana joked about reimbursing tattoo updates). More importantly, Copilot Studio now includes powerful testing tools to simulate user sessions and validate agent responses before going live.
Power Apps just got a major glow-up. Model-driven apps are no longer boring! With AI agents like the Data Entry Agent and Data Exploration Agent, you can auto-fill forms from emails or PDFs and explore data using natural language. Generative pages now let you build entire apps from Dataverse tables in minutes — with full code access for fine-tuning.
Power Automate is shifting toward agent flows. Microsoft is focusing heavily on agent flows, which are key to building intelligent agents that do more than chat. The designer UI is changing again (trainers, brace yourselves), and AI Builder prompts now let you extract data from images and documents. Still, standalone Power Automate deserves more love — and I’m on a mission to make that happen!
Microsoft 365 Copilot can now build, not just assist. Two new agents in the Frontier program — the Workflows Agent and App Builder Agent — let you create cloud flows and full-stack apps directly inside Copilot. No need to touch the code unless you want to. It’s productivity meets development, and it’s rolling out now!

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Hello everyone, Vlad here, reporting directly from Las Vegas, where I just stepped out of the Power Platform Community Conference keynote. And I don’t want to alarm you, but Microsoft just announced that low-code as we know it is dead — and the Power Platform has been reborn in the era of AI.

I’m not joking. That’s exactly what Microsoft said. Over the next few minutes, I’ll walk you through what was announced at the keynote — from new logos to new agents and features — and more importantly, why they matter and what you should try out right away.

The keynote was led by Charles Lamanna, President of Business and Industry Copilot at Microsoft, and someone we all know as the longtime leader of the Power Platform. Now, I know many of you love numbers, and while we didn’t get as many this year, there were still a few worth mentioning. First, the Power Platform now has 56 million monthly active users — up from 48 million in 2024 and 33 million in 2023. That’s a 70% growth over two years, which is incredible. Year-over-year growth is at 17%, showing that while it’s still growing, it’s starting to stabilize — a sign of maturity in the enterprise space. Considering Microsoft 365 has over 300 million monthly active users, there’s still plenty of room to grow. Charles even said he’d love to hit 500 million monthly active users, though that might take another year or two.

Another big number: Copilot Studio. Last year, 50,000 companies used it. This year, that number jumped to 200,000 organizations creating agents. To celebrate, Copilot Studio got a brand-new logo. Charles joked that if anyone has a tattoo of the old logo, they can send him an expense receipt for the new one, and he’ll reimburse it. He also apologized for all the stickers, shirts, and tattoos with the old icon — and again, said you can send a reimbursement for the new tattoo if you want. I won’t put my word on that, but that’s what he said!

Now, let’s talk features. The keynote emphasized that the Power Platform is changing — and so are our roles as makers. Microsoft said low-code is dead, but really, it’s evolving. We’re not just dragging and dropping anymore. We’re using AI to empower makers to do more. Even someone like me, who doesn’t know React, can use AI tools combined with low-code and no-code to build full-stack applications. We’ll get into the tools in just a minute.

Microsoft took a clever approach this year by revisiting use cases from previous conferences (2022–2024) and showing how those same solutions would look today — powered by AI. What used to be complex is now much easier.

Let’s start with Power Apps. The demos focused on model-driven apps, and I was genuinely surprised by how good they looked. I used to say that if you wanted a pretty app, go canvas; if you wanted something boring but functional, go model-driven. I can’t say that anymore — the new model-driven apps look fantastic.

One standout feature was the Data Entry Agent. Filling out forms is never fun, especially when the data already exists in a PDF or email. Now, you can drag and drop that document, and the agent will extract the data and fill the form for you. That’s real AI value. We also saw the Data Exploration Agent, which lets you filter data and create charts using plain language. It’s incredibly powerful.

Then came generative pages — a game changer. You provide your Dataverse tables and describe what the app should do, and it builds the entire solution for you. It uses React code in the backend, and since you have access to that code, you can make adjustments if needed. It’s a beautiful collaboration between app makers and developers, and it’s solution-aware, which will make IT admins happy.

AI is now infused throughout Power Apps — not just in a side panel. It helps create apps, fill forms, and even modify code. We also saw the evolution of the plan designer, which now includes multiple agents: requirements, data, code, and solution agents. The Data Agent can now create multiple tables, relationships, and manage row-level security. The Code Agent can generate backend code, connect to APIs, and more.

At this point in the keynote, I’ll admit I was a bit scared. It felt like low-code was being replaced by traditional coding. But Power Apps has always been a code-generating platform. Dragging and dropping created code behind the scenes. Now, Microsoft gives us access to that code, allowing us to build more powerful solutions with AI doing most of the work and us making the final tweaks. Low-code is still here — you can still point and click for the easy stuff.

Next up: Power Automate. If you saw my recap from the European Power Platform Conference, you’ll know I was worried about the future of standalone Power Automate. Microsoft seems to be focusing on agent flows, and today’s demo confirmed that. The UI of the designer is changing again — actions and parameters are going back inline, similar to the old designer, but with a modern look. Trainers will need to update their materials (myself included).

Agent flows are key to building agents that do more than chat. We saw how they use AI Builder prompts to extract data from images and connect to Dataverse. In one demo, AI was used to approve or deny insurance claims based on company knowledge. It was impressive. Still, I hope Microsoft brings these features to standalone Power Automate — and I plan to bug some PMs this week to make that happen.

We also saw a Copilot Studio demo where Microsoft built an agent that connected to an MCP server and other agents in under four minutes. While the backend setup of the MCP server takes much longer in reality, what impressed me was the new Copilot testing capabilities. You can now create test cases, simulate user sessions, and set expected answers — either by quality or exact match. This is huge for companies trying to publish agents confidently.

Finally, we got to Microsoft 365 Copilot — surprisingly late in the keynote. Until now, it’s focused on productivity, research, and skills. But now, it can build. Two new agents were announced in the Frontier program: the Workflows Agent and the App Builder Agent. The Workflows Agent helps build Power Automate cloud flows using knowledge and AI prompts. The App Builder Agent lets you create full-stack applications — UI, React-based code, logic, and data — all within Copilot, without ever touching the code unless you want to.

Of course, the IT Pro in me has questions: Where are these apps stored? What environments are they created in? Are they embedded in SharePoint? Are old connectors available? But that’s the fun of new features — they get announced, and now it’s up to us to experiment and see how they can help our organizations.

So, what do I want you to do? All the features I talked about are available now or rolling out starting today. It might take a few days to hit your tenant, but go try them out. And if you’re feeling overwhelmed by agents and Copilot Studio, I get it — it’s not the easiest thing to start with. That’s why I created a course called Getting Started with Creating Agents in Copilot Studio. In just two hours, you’ll learn the basics and build a solid foundation.

And if you wish you were here with me and the 7,000 other community members in Las Vegas, good news — Microsoft already confirmed next year’s event for October 2026. Save the date!

Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe — it means a lot. And don’t forget to check out the link to the Copilot Studio course on screen so you can start building your own agents. See you soon!

Power Platform Project Roles Explained: Who Does What?

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Want to understand how roles like app makers, IT pros, and developers fit into a Power Platform project? This clip gives you a quick breakdown of the key responsibilities — straight from my full Pluralsight course 👇

🎓 Watch the full course

In this video, we’ll cover:
✅ The essential roles in a Power Platform project — from business users to architects
✅ How responsibilities vary by company size and platform maturity
✅ What app makers really do (hint: it’s more than just building apps!)
✅ Why collaboration between business and IT is key to Power Platform success

Whether you’re building your first app or rolling out Power Platform across your org, this will help you understand who should be involved — and how they work together.

📌 Perfect for IT Pros, admins, functional consultants, and anyone curious about Power Platform team structure.

Video Summary

Business Users are the everyday heroes—they use the apps, flows, and reports, and their feedback helps improve the solutions. They’re the largest group in any organization.
App Makers bridge the gap between business and tech. They’re not in IT, but they have enough know-how to build no-code or low-code apps that boost productivity for their teams.
Developers handle the heavy lifting. They create custom connectors, PCF components, and integrations—especially for business-critical apps used across the organization.
Admins and IT Pros keep everything running smoothly. They manage environments, security policies, and service health. In smaller orgs, they often wear multiple hats, including platform ownership.
In mature organizations, you’ll see specialized roles. Think functional consultants, solution architects, and Power Platform owners who define vision, gather requirements, and design end-to-end solutions.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

If you’ve ever wondered who does what in a Power Platform project, this clip from my Pluralsight course is for you.

Let’s take a look at what kind of roles we can find in an organization using the Power Platform. And I’ll be the first to say that every organization is unique, but every successful organization using the Power Platform has multiple people working in different roles, and every role has different responsibilities. They work together to make sure that everything from a small app to a business-critical one is a success.

Let me start with some examples that every company has. First of all, the business user or the end user role is the role that most people in your organization will perform. They use the apps, flows, reports, and agents available in the enterprise and will, of course, provide feedback in order to make them better.

After that, we have the app maker role. App makers come from the business side. They do not work in the IT department, but they have enough technical knowledge to create no-code or even sometimes low-code solutions for their team and department. So, nothing business-critical for the whole organization, but enough to make their team and department more productive.

We then have developers who are responsible for creating anything from custom connectors, PCF components, and integrations using code, and they are the ones who are often involved in more business-critical applications that the whole organization will use.

We then have the administrator or IT pro who’s in charge of managing environments, security controls such as data loss prevention policies, and they monitor service health. In smaller organizations, they also act as a product owner or manager for the platform and inform all the other roles about upcoming changes to the Power Platform and, of course, promote its use inside the organization.

Now, if we go to bigger or more mature organizations, when it comes to the Power Platform, other roles you might see are dedicated functional consultants or business analysts who are responsible for gathering requirements, mapping them to capabilities, and helping with solution planning. You might also have solution architects who are responsible for designing the end-to-end Power Platform solution inside the company. And this role, while they do not do any of the actual app creation work themselves, they are the ones who have the whole picture of how everything inside the organization works together.

Finally, you might encounter a dedicated Power Platform owner or Center of Excellence lead who owns everything Power Platform inside the organization—from defining the vision to advocating for Power Platform inside the organization.

That’s just a snapshot of how the different roles work together. In the full Pluralsight course, I’ll go deeper into the App Maker role, including its governance responsibilities and permissions, and we’ll even cover the Microsoft credentials that can help you as an app maker grow. Check out the link in the description or the link on your screen right now to watch the full course.

Want to Learn Power Automate Fast? Master It in Under 3 Hours

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 12:00:00 GMT

If your organization runs on Microsoft 365, learning Power Automate is one of the best ways to save time and improve efficiency.

In this Pluralsight course, Getting Started with Microsoft Power Automate, I’ll walk you through how to build real automations—no code required. In under 3 hours, you’ll learn how to create cloud flows that eliminate repetitive tasks and connect across Teams, SharePoint, Planner, Excel, and more.

Here’s what you’ll learn:
✅ Core Power Automate concepts: connectors, triggers, and actions
✅ Common flows: purchase approvals, reminders, scheduled notifications
✅ Advanced logic: variables, expressions, error handling, and loops
✅ Integrations with Microsoft 365 apps
✅ How to prepare for the free Microsoft Applied Skill: Create and manage automated processes by using Power Automate

💡 Whether you’re brand new to automation or ready to skill up fast, this course will get you ready to build smarter workflows—and earn a credential to prove it.

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Video Summary

Manual processes? Time to automate.
Most organizations still rely on manual tasks that could easily be automated. Power Automate helps you streamline those repetitive processes.
Learn fast, build faster.
In under 3 hours, you’ll go from zero to building real cloud flows—no coding required.
Go beyond the basics.
You’ll not only learn the fundamentals like triggers and actions, but also how to use loops, conditions, error handling, and variables to make smarter workflows.
Connect with the tools you already use.
Power Automate integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams, Planner, SharePoint, Excel, and more—so your automations fit right into your daily work.
Validate your skills for free.
The course aligns with Microsoft’s free applied skill credential: Create and manage automated processes using Power Automate. It’s a great way to prove what you’ve learned.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

If your organization runs on Microsoft 365, learning Power Automate is one of the smartest investments you can make. Let’s be honest—every organization has processes that should be automated but are still done manually. That’s exactly where my latest Pluralsight course comes in. In the Getting Started with Microsoft Power Automate course, I walk you through everything you need to know to start automating real work in under three hours.

You’ll learn how to build your own cloud flows using Power Automate’s no-code interface. We’ll cover key concepts like connectors, triggers, and actions, and I’ll show you how to create common automations such as purchase approvals, task reminders, Teams notifications, and scheduled flows that pull data and send alerts.

We’ll also go beyond the basics. You’ll learn how to add logic, implement loops and conditions, handle errors gracefully, and use variables and expressions to make your automations smarter and more flexible. Plus, you’ll see how to integrate Power Automate with Microsoft Teams, Planner, SharePoint, Excel, and many other tools—so you’re not just learning theory, but building practical flows that apply across Microsoft 365.

And if you’re looking to validate your skills, this course maps directly to Microsoft’s applied skill credential called Create and manage automated processes using Power Automate, which is completely free. By the time you finish, you’ll not only be ready to automate your own workflows, but you’ll also be able to earn a Microsoft credential to prove it.

If you’re ready to stop doing the same tasks over and over again and start building smarter workflows, jump into the course today—and let’s get started!